Google’s desire for autonomous cars spurs clash with automakers

While both the technology giant and soon to be rival automakers mull the development of self-driving cars, their ideology and perspectives on the new segment are vastly and wildly different.

Actually, even as the Internet search giant is researching the perfect car – it drives itself, talks to other vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure, thus avoiding crashes and congestion – the autonomous car comes in a clash with more than a century of car making that has put up front the driver-car relation.

“Clearly there’s some sort of tension there,” said Richard Wallace, who works for the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Google’s over-confidence “lead to expectations creep that’s probably unrealistic in some ways,” he adds.

“When you’re at Google’s scale you do plenty of things that disrupt or change the environment,” also comments Frank Gillett, analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We now have a race for who’s going to build the software and services platform that operates driverless cars.”

For example, during the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress held last week in Detroit the automakers raced to present their latest advancements when it comes to driverless tech, driver assistance systems, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle to infrastructure communication. Yet, the multinational giant had a somewhat surprising minimal presence there.